American Viceroy

Zalmay Khalilzad’s mission.

One afternoon in mid-October, Zalmay Khalilzad, the American Ambassador to Iraq, received a visitor in his office at the United States Embassy in Baghdad. The Embassy, housed in Saddam Hussein’s old Republican Palace, is a warren of high-ceilinged rooms, great halls, and stairways, decorated in onyx and marble. The United States has established a paramilitary bureaucracy inside; its scale and its purposeful, nononsense atmosphere are reminiscent of the Pentagon. With five thousand employees and contractors, the Embassy is the true locus of power in Iraq. Khalilzad’s visitor was Falah al-Naqib, a Sunni Arab who had been Iraq’s interior minister in the pro-American government of Iyad Allawi until its defeat, in last January’s elections, by a coalition of Shiite religious parties. Naqib had come to Khalilzad, as many Iraqi politicians do, because he had an urgent problem to discuss.

Naqib told Khalilzad that he had a document showing that his successor at the interior ministry, Bayan Jabr, had ordered the arrests of sixteen Sunni men who were later found executed. He said that Jabr had also detained the son of a friend of his, for what he believed were political reasons. For months, there had been reports that newly formed interior-ministry brigades were carrying out death-squad-style operations in and around Baghdad—assassinating insurgent suspects, usually Sunnis. Jabr, a senior official in the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), had recruited a large number of militiamen from the group’s military wing, the Badr organization, into the government security forces. Naqib said that he believed the militias were a greater long-term problem than the insurgency, and he wanted Khalilzad to do something about it.

Khalilzad raised his eyebrows with interest, and signalled to an aide, who sat in a corner of the room taking notes. He acknowledged that militias were a problem. “They are the underpinnings of a future civil war, or of warlordism,” he told Naqib. He said that he planned to institute a program to get members of the militias off the street and into paying jobs. But his immediate concern was terrorists crossing the Syrian border into Iraq.

Khalilzad is accredited to the new Iraqi government, but, with the backing of a hundred and sixty thousand U.S. troops, he often seems to be the one holding the government together. His position is more like that of a viceroy or an imperial high commissioner than that of a traditional diplomat. And the conflict he is dealing with is increasingly sectarian. Ever since the U.S. invasion, in March of 2003, the minority Sunni Arabs, who were favored under Saddam Hussein, have felt disenfranchised by the shift in power to the Shiites. The Iraqi insurgency is largely Sunni, as are the foreign jihadi suicide bombers. Their primary victims, along with American soldiers, are Shiites, just as the victims of the Shiite gunmen and American soldiers are mostly Sunnis.

A few weeks after Naqib’s visit, I accompanied Khalilzad on a night flight out of Baghdad, headed for a conference in Vienna. On the plane, a military turboprop, an aide produced several paper bags bearing the Subway-sandwich logo; the chain has an outlet inside the Green Zone, the heavily protected area where the Embassy and Iraq’s government are situated and where most foreigners in Iraq live. Khalilzad is long-bodied and long-faced. He has hooded brown eyes, a large aquiline nose, and a strong jaw. He dresses sharply, favoring black or charcoal-gray business suits. He is fifty-four and walks with the loose-limbed saunter of a basketball player. As we ate, he told me that the previous night American troops had raided an interior-ministry building and discovered a hundred and seventy-three prisoners being held secretly in a basement cell. (The story appeared the next day on the front pages of newspapers around the world.) Many of the prisoners were malnourished or very sick, and showed signs of torture. Khalilzad said that the soldiers had found instruments of torture, including whips and metal cables, which he’d been shown in his office earlier that afternoon. “It was pretty bad,” he said.

Khalilzad has a reputation both as a strategic thinker and as an operator, a man with extraordinary political instincts, and the attention given to the raid on the prison did not seem to be accidental. When he told me about what the soldiers had found, it was clear that he had been prepared for the discovery, and that he had worked out the steps of his response in advance. The story looked like a disaster for the Bush Administration: the war had been justified (at least in retrospect) as a way of bringing democracy to Iraq; now, it seemed, the U.S. was propping up a government that used the same tactics against its opponents as Saddam had. But Khalilzad wasn’t unduly concerned; instead, he tried to spin the discovery as a good thing, because it would send a message to the Sunni community that the Americans were intervening on their behalf. It would also let the Shiites in the government know that there were limits to their power, which America was willing to enforce.

In the publicity surrounding the interior ministry’s secret prison, Sunni politicians were at the forefront of those denouncing the government. Since the war began, Sunnis generally have been perceived as Baathists, disgruntled tribalists, or Islamist terrorists. (And in fact Naqib, for all his expressions of outrage, has been accused of allowing torture when he was in office.) This was one of the first times that the Sunnis had been able to claim convincingly that they were the victims, and by doing so they had gained a new legitimacy. That opportunity had been managed by the American representative in Iraq and an enemy of the Sunni insurgency—Zalmay Khalilzad.

In many ways, Khalilzad seems the ideal envoy for Iraq. He was born in Afghanistan, was educated in Beirut and America, and is a moderate Muslim with long experience in American foreign-policy circles. Since September 11, 2001, he has been at the center of the Administration’s war on terror. When the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, Khalilzad was a special assistant to the President on the Middle East and Western Asia, reporting to the then nationalsecurity adviser, Condoleezza Rice. He worked closely with the Northern Alliance and other opponents of the Taliban regime. After Kabul fell, he helped to put together the transitional government of Hamid Karzai. In late 2002, with the Iraq war in the planning stages, President Bush named him Ambassador at Large for Free Iraqis.

Khalilzad was a hawk; he was close to neoconservatives like Richard Perle and former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and had argued for regime change in Iraq for more than a decade. He arrived in Baghdad a few days after the first American troops, alongside General Jay Garner, who was sent to supervise the reconstruction of Iraq. But a few weeks later Khalilzad and Garner were suddenly recalled to Washington, apparently at the behest of the Pentagon, and were replaced by Paul Bremer, who became the head of the new Coalition Provisional Authority. Bremer, in almost every major aspect, proved to be ineffectual. His peremptory dissolution of the Iraqi Army, in May of 2003, gave the insurgency vigor and a vastly expanded constituency.

In late 2003, Khalilzad was sent to Afghanistan as the U.S. Ambassador. The political capital he has in the Administration—which is considerable—is due to his successes there. While he was in Kabul, Afghanistan held its first free elections in history, which Karzai won handily. Karzai regarded Khalilzad as his close friend and adviser; he was very unhappy when, last April, President Bush nominated Khalilzad to replace Bremer’s successor in Baghdad, John Negroponte. Karzai appealed to President Bush several times to reconsider his decision.

Bush moved Khalilzad anyway. American forces had lost control of security in Iraq. There were more than a hundred car bombings in April alone, and the death toll for American soldiers had passed seventeen hundred. (As of last week, it had risen to over twenty-one hundred.) In October, the Pentagon published its first statistics for Iraq’s war dead; it estimated that nearly twenty-six thousand Iraqis had been killed by insurgents between January, 2004, and September, 2005. The figure did not include Iraqis killed by Americans.

When Khalilzad was offered the Ambassador’s job, he called Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s national-security adviser, who was Khalilzad’s mentor when they were both on the faculty at Columbia, in the early eighties. “I told him he should be in charge of policy and not just the execution of policy,” Brzezinski said recently. “He brings a lot more to bear than his predecessors, who knew nothing about Iraq. I wonder how many of our top decision-makers knew, a few years ago, the difference between a Sunni and a Shia. It was a gutsy decision to put himself in the line of fire. He is a broad-minded pragmatist and an insightful strategist. He has a unique advantage in a part of the world in which the United States has become massively engaged and does not have many people at the top equipped to deal with it. The top decision-makers today are ignorant and Manichaean.”

Kenneth Adelman, a member of the advisory Defense Policy Board and a prominent advocate for the invasion of Iraq, told me, “I was a little worried when they pulled him out of Afghanistan for Iraq, because he was Afghan, he spoke the language, and he was doing such a good job there—I just couldn’t believe they didn’t have anyone else who could do Iraq for them.” Adelman said that Khalilzad, who is allied with Secretary of State Rice, was “dealing with the most important issue for the Administration. He’s at the nexus.” He added, “We certainly would’ve been a lot better off had he been there since the beginning.”

Lakhdar Brahimi, a special adviser to Kofi Annan, the U.N. SecretaryGeneral, made a similar point when I spoke to him. “I was dead against the war, but the impression I have is that Khalilzad would have brought some very useful insights and feeling to the situation,” he said.

Adel Abdul Mahdi, the Shiite Vice-President of Iraq, told me, “Bremer was an administrator, Negroponte was a diplomat, and Zalmay, well, he’s an Oriental.”

I asked Mahdi what he meant.

“Zalmay presents himself as from the region,” he explained. “He behaves in a more friendly way. He understands the culture here and knows he can invite himself to come and see us. He’ll drop in and say, ‘Can we have a moment together?,’ knowing that other people will come by, as is our custom, and that he will be there, and he will discuss things with them, be part of our discussions.”

I heard a similar assessment from an Iraqi who is a consultant to a senior politician. “Zal makes it look like his suggestions are in the Iraqi interests. All the major players like him.” And, he added, Khalilzad “knows how to play his Muslim card.”

A former senior State Department official who worked closely with Khalilzad on Afghanistan said that he was impressed with what he accomplished there, but cautioned that Iraq would be more difficult. “In the last two years, we’ve gone from being in charge to not wanting to be in charge,” he said. “Zal’s job is to handle a transition in which the Iraqis are increasingly in charge. Zal is able to operate in this kind of an environment. I am sometimes saddened by the fact that we had him on the ground in 2003 and then he was pulled out, and he’s there now at a time which, in automotive terms, I would call top dead center—it’s at a tipping point, it could go one way or the other, and I don’t think anyone with any sense can say they can call it.”

Khalilzad’s scaled-down brief is to secure enough stability and political progress in Iraq to allow for an American withdrawal. The question is whether the situation has reached an irretrievable point even for the best of diplomats—whether Khalilzad might be the right man at the wrong time. There is an inescapable irony to Khalilzad’s return to Baghdad. Not only is he expected to salvage a situation worsened by political misjudgments made by the same officials who removed him from the scene in 2003 but he is also, in a way that almost no other hawk is, dealing with the consequences of a war he helped start.

“Khalilzad was absolutely part of the neocon cabal that brought the war to Iraq,” Peter W. Galbraith, a former U.S. Ambassador to Croatia, who has written extensively on Iraq and the Kurds, said. Still, he added, “I credit him with bringing the first dose of realism I’ve seen in this Administration since they came to Iraq.”

Khalilzad told me that in 2003 he had been able to move around freely on Baghdad’s streets and buy ice cream, something that was no longer conceivable. Back then, he was very hopeful for Iraq. Two and a half years later, he had returned to a radically altered landscape, with an insurgency capable of mounting an average of seventy attacks each day. Barely four months into his tenure, there was an intensifying campaign in Congress to withdraw American soldiers from what looked to many like an unwinnable war. Khalilzad said, “Willy-nilly, we’ve gotten ourselves into a situation where our power and our prestige, our future security, have gotten very linked with this.”

Later, he said, “I see myself as a soldier, a kind of diplomatic soldier, reënlisting. When I had to come to Iraq after Afghanistan, it was not an easy decision. I had developed such good relations with a lot of people there; I felt that a lot had been achieved but that Afghanistan still had a long way to go. And then to come here . . .”

In Baghdad, the threat of violence is so omnipresent that it has become mundane. Sometimes it hits with precision, and at other times with the randomness of a tornado. When three suicide car bombers struck the Palestine and Sheraton hotels in October, killing seventeen people, I was staying in a villa a few hundred feet away; the building shook, and many of its windows were shattered. Dozens of pieces of shrapnel landed in the garden, along with the twisted chunk of a car radiator. The next morning, amid the debris, I found two severed human feet lying in the street, a hundred yards apart, like uncollected garbage.

The Green Zone offers some degree of sanctuary from the war. Except for the mortar shells that are lobbed into it, and the bombs that periodically go off around it (and, on a couple of occasions, inside it), Iraq’s violence is something of an abstraction to the Americans who live there. But at the barricaded entrances where people and cars are checked, where the Zone ends and Iraq begins, the Iraqi soldiers are often edgy; twice during my stay, they fired bullets over my head when my car pulled in too close to their positions. One day, after meeting with Khalilzad, I was about to walk out of the Green Zone when there was a large explosion several hundred feet away, outside the walls. It was followed by the sound of shooting. A car bomb had destroyed an S.U.V. being driven by contractors for DynCorp International. It killed two of them, both South Africans.

Khalilzad’s residence in the Green Zone, a large brick house similar to those in Baghdad’s affluent neighborhoods, is down a street lined with high concrete blast walls. Access is controlled by U.S. soldiers and bodyguards, and approaching vehicles must pass over the steel hatches of a tank trap. Whenever Khalilzad leaves the Green Zone, he travels with his own mobile war machine: a convoy of vehicles with an array of armaments, driven by his security men, American employees of Blackwater, a firm based in North Carolina. They are known in Baghdad for ramming cars that don’t get out of their way fast enough. Helicopters often provide air support.

For Iraqi officials who work in the Zone but live elsewhere, the risks are multiplied; many have been assassinated on their way to or from their neighborhoods. Those with the means to do so send their families abroad. In November, I sat in on a meeting between Khalilzad and Adnan Pachachi, a patrician Sunni secularist who in the nineteen-sixties served as Iraq’s foreign minister and as its U.N. Ambassador. Pachachi lives in Baghdad outside the Green Zone, but his wife and daughter live in London, as do close relatives of Ahmad Chalabi, the former exiled politician; Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the Prime Minister; and Iyad Allawi. (Mahdi’s wife and children live in France; his brother was assassinated in Baghdad in October.) At one point, Khalilzad mentioned having gone into the “Red Zone” to visit a cleric. Pachachi looked perplexed, and asked him, “What is that, the Red Zone?” Momentarily embarrassed, Khalilzad explained that he had meant to say “Baghdad.”

Another day, Khalilzad met with the Ambassador representing one of America’s coalition partners, a country that has a contingent of troops in Iraq. Khalilzad steered the discussion to a reconstruction program that he hoped the country would join. But the foreign Ambassador wanted to talk about a security issue. A senior Iraqi government official had seized the building that the Ambassador’s country had acquired inside the Green Zone for its embassy. (The foreign Ambassador asked that the name of his country and of the Iraqi official be withheld from this report, because of safety concerns.) As a result, he and his staff had been forced to live in dangerous conditions outside the Green Zone.

Khalilzad said that housing in the Green Zone was a problem. Jaafari and President Jalal Talabani had recently feuded over a vacant building. “The President almost sent in his peshmerga”—Kurdish militiamen, Khalilzad said, laughing. The foreign Ambassador listened to this anecdote in stony silence. (I learned later that Jaafari’s and Talabani’s men had been on the verge of a shootout when Khalilzad intervened. Talabani kept the building, a former NATO headquarters.)

Khalilzad tried to change the subject to aid money that the foreign Ambassador’s country had pledged. The foreign Ambassador told him, “There’s been a slowdown in the investment. There is opposition, you see, because of the housing issue. If the Iraqi government doesn’t care enough about a government that puts that much money into its country, then why . . .” His voice trailed off, and he looked at Khalilzad expectantly.

Khalilzad promised to talk with the Iraqi Prime Minister about the house, and for the first time the foreign Ambassador looked pleased. “You would be loved by my guards,” he said.

When Khalilzad arrived in Baghdad this summer, his first task was to broker a compromise on a constitution. The deadline was August 15th, and there were deep divisions. Sunnis had, by and large, boycotted last January’s election for the assembly responsible for producing the document, and many felt that their interests were being ignored. The deadline was extended for two weeks, at Khalilzad’s urging, as he tried to broker a compromise.

Tariq al-Hashemi, the leader of the Sunni-dominated Iraqi Islamic Party, told me that Khalilzad helped to persuade him to endorse the draft. Hashemi said that many Sunnis did not understand or agree with his decision; extremists fired a rocket at his party headquarters in retaliation. When he spoke to Khalilzad, Hashemi said, “I made the point to him that he must insure that Iraq remains whole for the time being. We’re on the brink of civil war, and I fear the future is still rather dim.”

Hachem al-Hassani, a U.S.-educated Sunni moderate who is the speaker of Iraq’s transitional National Assembly, agreed that Khalilzad had helped to bring Sunnis into the political process. “Khalilzad played the role of mediator,” he said. “Everyone knows he’s quite close to the Bush Administration, so this is quite useful.”

The Shiite SCIRI leader, Abdulaziz al-Hakim, was more guarded. In the constitutional negotiations, he said, “the U.S. had big concerns; there were a lot of American interests involved. We can’t say that Mr. Zal was neutral in the full meaning of the word, and this had to do with U.S. strategy. President Bush even intervened in the process, by calling me. This is natural.”

Peter Galbraith served as an informal adviser to the Kurdish leaders Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani during the negotiations and attended a number of meetings with Khalilzad. He said that Khalilzad, whom he has known for twenty years, proved to be a pragmatist. “This surprised me, frankly, because he is extremely ideological, extremely partisan. But I was impressed with what he did.”

Galbraith’s satisfaction, however, has much to do with what others see as the constitution’s great weakness: that it prepares the way for Iraq to split into Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish statelets. In the end, Galbraith said, the Kurds “got everything they wanted: control of their oil, supremacy of Kurdish law over Iraqi law, and their own army, as well as limitation on the power of the central government.” Many of the thorniest issues, however, including the Shiites’ demand for an autonomous region of their own, were left unresolved. The draft was approved in a national referendum, despite opposition in Sunni provinces.

Galbraith has been one of the chief spokesmen for the idea that the break-up of Iraq would be for the best. “Iraq as a country will not hold together,” he said. “The question is what is a decent interval, and whether there will be two states or three. But sooner or later there will be an independent Kurdistan. And this is something Khalilzad grasps. He did what strategists ought to do, he prioritized.” Galbraith pointed out that under Khalilzad the rhetoric about a U.S. commitment to a single, unified nation of Iraq had diminished. “He understood quickly that this constitution was more of a peace treaty than a nation-building exercise, and that what he had to produce was a road map to avoid a future civil war.

“Khalilzad is clearly a policymaker on this,” Galbraith said. “There’s a common misunderstanding that American Ambassadors go and have tea and carry messages that have been formulated in Washington. But, really, the Ambassador is in charge of policy in that country. You have the expertise, the knowledge, and know the people, and ultimately it’s your position that gets carried. You have an advantage over the people in Washington. Khalilzad understood this in Afghanistan and he understands it in Iraq. And he’s in the business of shaping his own instructions. So when he’s going out and talking with Sunni sheikhs, or delaying the constitution to allow compromises to be made, that’s him doing it, not Washington.”

As I watched Khalilzad at work, he seemed less a diplomat than a chaos theorist, looking for strands of order in disorder. Khalilzad said, “I tell my friends, ‘There is turmoil under the heavens, and there are lots of opportunities now available.’ If you’ve got a difficult situation, and a lot of players, and some of them are less good than others, then turmoil is an opportunity.”

Khalilzad is not a particularly gifted public speaker. He has a pleasant manner, but his speeches are full of pauses and catchphrases—usually echoes of things that President Bush and Condoleezza Rice have already said. His true métier is the closed-door meeting. In his office, he rarely sits behind his desk, preferring to pull a chair out and join his interlocutors. When he is with Iraqis, he often fingers a set of green stone prayer beads, though in a more absent-minded way than religious Muslims, who use each bead as a mental prayer-stop; for Khalilzad, the beads serve as a sort of prop, a convenient visual reminder of his Muslim identity. He is highly attuned to social niceties; when he met with Ayatollah Hussein al-Sadr, a leading cleric, he sat much more straight-backed than he usually does, with his knees held closely together. His prayer beads were prominently employed.

When he met with Falah al-Naqib, however, Khalilzad sat in a chair in front of his desk, while Naqib perched on the visitors’ couch. This had the effect of making Naqib look slightly up at Khalilzad as they spoke. On this occasion, Khalilzad played with his beads in the way that a business executive might play with a pen. He rarely betrayed his opinion; rather than agree with Naqib’s more provocative statements, he’d say, “You think so?”

At one point, Naqib leaned forward and asked nervously, “Can you tell me whether the rumor we are hearing is true—that the Pentagon is supporting Ahmad Chalabi for the election?” Looking amused, Khalilzad said, “I can assure you that is not the case.” He added that it was U.S. policy not to favor any candidate. Naqib listened to Khalilzad attentively and said, “O.K., then.” He looked relieved.

The parliamentary elections, scheduled for December 15th, were a central theme in most of Khalilzad’s meetings. Khalilzad relayed messages about America’s interests, cloaked in diplomatic obliqueness but decipherable to his interlocutors. I had found it to be an article of faith among many Iraqis that Allawi, the former interim Prime Minister, remained the preferred candidate of the U.S. and British governments. Naqib and Pachachi have joined his coalition. Khalilzad, in his meetings with them, raised the issue of corruption every time Allawi’s name was mentioned. The Jaafari government had issued arrest warrants against some two dozen former officials of Allawi’s government, in a case involving a billion dollars in missing government funds. When Khalilzad asked Pachachi about the charges, Pachachi replied sanguinely that he thought they were politically motivated. When Khalilzad asked Naqib about corruption, he said, “This is inevitable, because of the insecurity in the country.”

“So everyone is just raking it in, as insurance?” Khalilzad was smiling.

“Exactly,” Naqib said. “I’ll bet this government, after it ends, will be discovered to have been ten times more corrupt than our government.”

I asked Khalilzad whether the corruption charges might ensnare Allawi. He said that although he had some concerns, he had seen no evidence implicating Allawi personally, and that he had talked to him about the matter, stressing that he must clear his name. Khalilzad’s emphasis on the issue when talking to Allawi’s allies seemed to have multiple purposes: to make them aware of the need to deal with the charges, to foster the impression that the U.S. was neutral, and, possibly, to distance the U.S. if more evidence against Allawi emerged.

Khalilzad said that he regarded Allawi, Jaafari, and Mahdi, the Shiite Vice-President, as the front-runners in the election, with Ahmad Chalabi as a likely compromise candidate. Chalabi was for years a favorite of neoconservatives, but his reputation has suffered because of his promotion of bad intelligence on W.M.D.s, and in May, 2004, he was accused of passing classified information to Iran. But Chalabi has remained politically prominent in Iraq—he is now a deputy Prime Minister—and, when he visited Washington in November, he met with Vice-President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Rice.

Barham Salih, a leading Kurdish politician, said, “One thing to know about Zal is that no one can bullshit him.” During the constitutional talks, Iraqi politicians were “like a herd of cats, and he was the herder,” Salih said. “Zal is definitely a strategist, but he also has an eye for the detail; he doesn’t mind spending long hours with small players, if he feels it’s important for the ultimate goal. So he’s good on tactics, too.” Salih added that Khalilzad’s ability, as an Afghan immigrant, to reach such heights within the U.S. policy establishment was an enduring source of interest to politicians in Baghdad. “Iraqis are fascinated by this,” he said.

Khalilzad was born in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif in 1951. At the time, his father was a civil servant in the government of King Zahir Shah, working in the local office of the ministry of finance. His mother, he said, “did not have a formal education, yet she was very modern, always very informed. She could not read or write herself, but she would have the kids read the newspapers to her. I think if she had been born at a different time she would have been quite an established political figure.”

Cheryl Benard, Khalilzad’s wife, an Austrian-American who is a senior political analyst at RAND, the research group, where she and her husband have worked off and on for years, told me, “Zal’s mother was married to his father at the age of twelve. His father was a mid-upper-level bureaucrat—and an autocrat. Zal calls his mother a tough cookie. He believes that if you don’t have social advancement of women in society you don’t have social advancement period. One of the things about the United States that appealed to Zal was the way women were treated.”

When Khalilzad finished the eighth grade, the family moved to Kabul; by the tenth grade, he had become the top student in his class, and was given a chance to be an exchange student in the United States. He spent his year with a family in Ceres, a town near Modesto, California—the father was an engineer at the Gallo winery and the mother was a schoolteacher. When he returned to Afghanistan, Khalilzad said, he had changed. “I had different values, greater interest in sports, a more pragmatic way of looking at things, and a broader horizon. I had a sense of how backward Afghanistan was. And I became more interested in how Afghanistan needed to change.”

After high school, Khalilzad enrolled at Kabul University. “One day, I was walking around with my friends, and there was an announcement for tests for scholarships to the American University of Beirut,” he recalled. They decided to take the tests just to prove they could pass, “like a prank.” Soon after, Khalilzad learned that he had won a scholarship, and had four weeks to leave for Beirut. “I remember telling them I didn’t plan to go. They were shocked.” But the American Ambassador, Robert G. Neumann, whom Khalilzad met at a Fourth of July party, convinced him to take it. (This summer, Neumann’s son, Ronald, assumed his father’s old post, after Khalilzad vacated it.)

Khalilzad arrived in Beirut in 1970 and stayed until 1974, the year before the civil war broke out in Lebanon. He studied political science and the history of the Middle East. At the time, Beirut was a sophisticated and cosmopolitan place, and the American University was one of the intellectual and cultural fulcrums of the Middle East, where young Arabs, Europeans, and Americans met and studied and debated issues openly. “It was a great place to be a young person,” Khalilzad recalled. “There were kids from all over the world. And I was taught a lot about Afghanistan and the Middle East.”

Khalilzad also met Cheryl Benard, who was researching a dissertation on Arab nationalism. “I’m a military brat,” Benard said. “My father was with the American occupation forces in Vienna. My mother was Austrian. I grew up on military bases in the U.S. and Europe.” Benard is a slim, youthful-looking woman with fair skin and curly hair. She and Khalilzad have two sons: the older is twenty-two, and the younger is fourteen.

In 1975, Khalilzad went to the University of Chicago to pursue a doctorate in political science. “Zal was very much a child of the seventies, in jeans, a dishevelled haircut,” Augustus Richard Norton, one of his fellow-students and now a professor of international relations at Boston University, recalled. “He looked very much the part of a West Beirut radical in those days.”

At Chicago, Khalilzad became a student of Albert Wohlstetter, an expert in military strategy. Wohlstetter’s argument that the U.S. should achieve global supremacy through strategic nuclear weaponry had a powerful effect on the thinking of the nascent movement of American neoconservatives. Khalilzad recalled that he had sat in on a lecture in which Wohlstetter spoke about the “inevitability of war.” Khalilzad raised his hand and asked about “the inevitability of permanent peace.” This got Wohlstetter’s attention. He asked to see Khalilzad after class, and invited him to join a seminar he taught.

Wohlstetter held his seminars at his Chicago apartment, to which he invited people like Wolfowitz, who had been his student, to speak to the group. “Zal thrived in this environment,” Norton said. Wohlstetter had cultivated a network of like-minded thinkers, both at Chicago and at RAND, where he worked for many years, and several had gone on to jobs in government. (Wohlstetter introduced Perle to Chalabi.) According to Norton, Wohlstetter helped Khalilzad to make contacts in Washington early in his career. “Without the connections, Zal might have ended up as an obscure academic,” Norton said. “What Albert was able to do was to give him fast-track access to fairly Olympian heights of power, and that’s quite an advantage.”

Khalilzad told me that he found Wohlstetter a fascinating figure, “a name-dropper of people like J.F.K. and Kissinger.” He began working for a think tank that Wohlstetter had formed, Pan Heuristics, which had contracts with the U.S. government. Khalilzad wrote papers for Pan Heuristics on nuclear proliferation, and a Ph.D. thesis on Iran’s nuclear program. “Wohlstetter became a huge influence in his life; it was what turned him toward strategy,” Cheryl Benard said.

In 1979, Khalilzad accepted an offer to teach in the political-science department at Columbia. In December of that year, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Khalilzad wrote several articles on the fight against the Soviets, using a pseudonym to protect members of his family who were still there. “I wrote that the Soviets had made a huge mistake in invading Afghanistan, that they could be defeated,” Khalilzad said. This went against the conventional wisdom that the Soviets would overwhelm the Afghans. “The articles got a great amount of attention in the government circles.”

Khalilzad became an American citizen in 1984, and soon afterward won a fellowship from the Council on Foreign Relations, intended to give academics practical experience. “I was going to do it on nuclear war at the Defense Department. But George Shultz, Secretary of State at the time, had heard this, and said, ‘No, no, no, forget about nuclear stuff, we need him on two wars we have, the Iran-Iraq War and the Afghan war.’ ”

Cheryl Benard said, “He loved teaching, but, like any political scientist, you’d like your advice to be listened to.” She added, “He’d come home and describe a day that would have made me want to shoot myself. But his eyes were glowing.”

The U.S. had been channelling aid to the mujahideen through the C.I.A. and the Pakistani intelligence service. Around the time Khalilzad arrived, in 1985, President Reagan signed a secret directive authorizing an increase in aid to the Afghans, but the Administration was divided over whether that should include sophisticated heat-seeking anti-aircraft Stinger missiles. Khalilzad argued strongly that it should. After months of debate, the mujahideen got the Stingers.

“The Stingers sent a big message,” Khalilzad said. “It was an open secret that we were involved, but the intelligence channel gave us deniability. The Stingers removed that. American power and prestige had become engaged, we had crossed a threshold. But, at the same time, there was a lot of soul-searching as to whether or not this was going to make it harder for the Soviets to back down.”

The Stingers undermined the Soviets’ aerial dominance, and are now regarded as having helped induce the Kremlin leadership to withdraw from Afghanistan in 1989. The war had killed more than a million Afghans, maimed tens of thousands, and created five million refugees. After the Soviets left, the U.S. cut back its support for the mujahideen, who, awash with weaponry, were left to fight it out amongst themselves. This led to a devastating civil war, the rise of the Taliban, and, ultimately, to Al Qaeda’s use of Afghanistan as its base. Khalilzad, who is proud of his role, has a nuanced and somewhat problematic view of the U.S.’s responsibility for the implosion, one that suggests that the fault lies not with the policy he advocated but with those who questioned it.

“Let me first make a broader point about my beliefs,” he told me, in the midst of a discussion about Iraq. “I think it’s a terrible mistake to think at the beginning of something that you know the end. It sometimes can have a very distorting effect on what you do, and precludes some options, and limits the realm of possibility. In Afghanistan, for instance, one of the terrible assumptions was that the Soviets were going to win. And so no care was given to whom you were helping, and what might happen after the Soviet withdrawal. Because there wasn’t going to be a post-Soviet scenario. May-be we wouldn’t have allowed so many Arabs to come in, maybe we wouldn’t have subcontracted so many things.”

It was the fight against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan that pushed Khalilzad toward becoming a foreign-policy hawk. In 1988, he wrote a policy paper that called for the U.S. to shift its focus from Iran to Iraq. “It was a simple geopolitical kind of analysis, which said that Iran had weakened dramatically at the last phase of the Iran-Iraq War and that Iraq had emerged as the dominant military power in the Gulf,” Khalilzad said. “We needed to consider some tough options: do we help Iran directly or indirectly, do we play a more direct role in containing Iraq ourselves, or do we undermine Iraq, or Saddam, from within? Somebody leaked it to the New York Times, and it was reported that the Administration was considering a new policy toward Iraq and Iran.”

As a result of the leak, Secretary Shultz convened a meeting. “Shultz asked who had written the memo. People said, ‘Zal wrote it.’ As Shultz was reading it, his face was getting redder and redder and redder. I said, ‘Sir, I’m being paid to offer geopolitical advice.’ And right then and there he wrote a big ‘NO’ on it,” Khalilzad said. “But the idea had been disseminated.”

Khalilzad left government to go to RAND in 1988. The next year, General Norman Schwarzkopf, the head of the U.S. Army’s Central Command, asked him to take part in a study of the threat posed by Saddam. “Within days, RAND got a big contract,” Khalilzad said. “I was called by the Secretary of Defense, Cheney at the time, to see if I would come and work for the Defense Department. I got to the job a couple of days after we started the attack.”

Khalilzad was unhappy with the conclusion of the war, which drove Saddam from Kuwait but left him in power. “I had thought, frankly, that we should have helped the Iraqis get rid of Saddam,” he said. “There was of course a legitimate concern, clearly, that if we went to Baghdad we might get stuck. I remember sending memos to Cheney, saying, ‘You can’t stop! We have an opportunity to do a bigger thing.’ ”

After the war, Khalilzad was given the task of assembling an analysis of America’s strategic position in the new, post-Cold War world. The result was what he refers to as the “infamous” draft Defense Planning Guidance of 1992. It reflected the contributions of many officials in the Pentagon, including Wolfowitz and Cheney, and it articulated a strategic view that Khalilzad shared. Khalilzad recalled, “The central core of the D.P.G. was that bipolarity had ended, and the U.S. was now the world’s single leading power, and that our goal in this new era was to preclude a return to a bipolar system, or a multipolar system.” The draft laid out a strategy for maintaining America’s global hegemony through the threat of force against emerging regional powers. It, too, was leaked to the press, where it was widely criticized, and as a result the rewritten, final version was less confrontational. But the draft D.P.G. is now seen as defining the hard-line neoconservative doctrine that contemplated, among other things, preëmptive warfare.

Khalilzad resists being labelled a neoconservative. (“To the best of my knowledge, I have not sat together with people and said, ‘Aha! Here is a doctrine, and this is what it means,’ ” he said.) As far as Iraq is concerned, however, he was in the neoconservative camp for years before the war. In 1998, Khalilzad signed an open letter to President Clinton that called for more robust action against Saddam. Other signatories included Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Perle. Khalilzad told me that he had signed on because “when I left the government there was this sense that we had not done the right thing in Iraq. We had unfinished business.”

When Khalilzad has appeared in the press over the years, it has often been in connection with behind-the-scenes policymaking, and in certain quarters he is regarded as a Strangelovian figure, a dark eminence of American imperial power. One issue that has provoked controversy is his association with the energy company Unocal, which earned Khalilzad a cameo in Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11.” In the mid-nineties, Unocal had tried unsuccessfully to secure a gas-pipeline deal from the Taliban government, which had seized power in Kabul in 1996 after years of civil war. Moore suggested that Republicans had first pandered to the Taliban, at the behest of their cohorts in the oil industry, and then turned against them when they didn’t make a deal.

Khalilzad worked as a paid consultant on the pipeline project, and during the negotiations he publicly expressed support for the Taliban. In 1996, in an editorial for the Washington Post, Khalilzad wrote, “The Taliban does not practice the anti-U.S. style of fundamentalism practiced by Iran—it is closer to the Saudi model. The group upholds a mix of traditional Pashtun values and an orthodox interpretation of Islam.” He also met with Taliban emissaries on a trip to Houston.

Richard Norton recalled taking part in a seminar with Khalilzad around that time. “One of the questions we debated was whether we could work with the Taliban, and he was optimistic,” Norton said. “Zal’s been right on a lot of things, but he was certainly wrong on that.”

Khalilzad told me, “It’s become an urban legend that this whole thing about Afghanistan is about oil. I was asked, not by Unocal but by Cambridge Energy Research Associates, a research company, if I would do a cost-benefit analysis of building pipelines across Afghanistan. And from then it evolved, but I always went through Cambridge. And during that time I also testified a couple of times on Afghanistan to Congress, and I was very critical of the Taliban.”

Khalilzad said that what changed his mind about the Taliban was their brutality, not the failed deal. And he was not the only former official involved. Still, in many ways, the pipeline project represented the classic Washington revolving door between the corporate world and the foreign-policy establishment.

“You can look at Zal’s political career and find things to criticize,” Cheryl Benard said. “Unocal, for instance. Political scientists, especially if they are regional experts, frequently do risk analysis for corporations. Yet, in Zal’s case, this gets blown all out of proportion. There are Web sites and news reports that try and see Zal’s role with Unocal as an explanation for the U.S. attack on Afghanistan. It’s crazy.”

After George W. Bush was elected, in 2000, Khalilzad ran the transition team at the Pentagon for Donald Rumsfeld. “Rumsfeld may have considered him too wimpy, because he was always smiling, and just too nice for the tough job,” Ken Adelman, of the Defense Policy Board, told me. “That may be why he didn’t get the under-secretary-for-policy post, for which he would have been ideal. It went to Doug Feith, instead, which was very unfortunate, as later became quite evident.” (Feith played a key role in assembling the intelligence used to build the Administration’s case for the war.) Khalilzad went to the National Security Council instead. “He was a staffer, and not a very prominent staffer,” Adelman said. “But then 9/11 came along, and people looked around and there he was.”

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Khalilzad was in the White House Situation Room, where Condoleezza Rice was chairing a meeting. “There was a TV screen hanging in a corner of the room,” Khalilzad told me. “When the first plane hit, we had a sense that, oh, maybe it had lost its way. As soon as the second plane hit, the meeting was called to an end and she rushed away. We went outside the White House to Pennsylvania Avenue and waited awhile till we got the all-clear sign. While we were out, there had been all sorts of rumors and reports, that Capitol Hill had been hit, and the Pentagon, obviously, had been hit. Then we started to look at the intelligence. I started looking at Afghanistan, tracing Al Qaeda.”

In the days after September 11th, Khalilzad was involved in discussions about the Administration’s response. “It was momentous,” Khalilzad said. “I realized that we were now going to get involved in a war and that Afghanistan was the likely theatre. At that moment, the post-Cold War era was being defined. Afghanistan was marginal to U.S. interests, and then became very central, overnight.”

Lakhdar Brahimi, the U.N. official, told me that he met Khalilzad for the first time during negotiations in Bonn, in December of 2001, to form a post-Taliban coalition government. “We both had a very deep commitment to the people of Afghanistan,” he said. “Obviously, I represented the United Nations and he the United States, and each of us came with our own baggage.” But Khalilzad, Brahimi said, “has a unique capacity to listen. And also a capacity to pick or to find a common ground between views that, to the casual observer, look totally irreconcilable. A good negotiator listens to the views that are expressed and tries to find a sentence—even a single word—that coincides with the opposite view, and uses that to create a common ground. He can do that.”

Another international official who participated in the Bonn negotiations told me, “Brahimi was good cop, and Zal was bad cop. It worked well: Zal was very good about getting on the phone and threatening people. He was comfortable with that kind of use of power.”

Several months later, Khalilzad was assigned to organize Iraqi exiles in anticipation of an American invasion. He convened a conference in London, in December, 2002, with delegates from the groups led by Chalabi, Allawi, Barzani, Talabani, and Hakim, among others, and a second in February, 2003, in the Kurdish-held Iraqi town of Salahuddin. Khalilzad travelled in a convoy four hundred kilometres into northern Iraq; he could see Saddam’s troops over the line of control.

These talks, and others that followed, were an education for him, he said. Among advocates of the war, there was a debate about whether to install a provisional government of Iraqi opposition figures or to establish an occupation authority with Iraqis in an advisory role. Khalilzad had favored the latter approach, but when he talked to the Iraqis “they were passionately hostile to that. So I then carried a message that this wasn’t going to work for us,” he said. At one point, the Administration accepted the idea of a provisional government, but around the time Bremer was appointed “the whole game changed,” he said. Iraq was placed under U.S.-British trusteeship by a U.N. resolution.

“We were all angry when we found out,” Mahdi, the Shiite Vice-President, said. He shrugged, and added, “The American Administration was very confused in those days.” Pachachi recalled being summoned by Khalilzad to Baghdad and arriving, in early May, to find him already gone, replaced by Bremer, whom he described as “the Pentagon’s man.” He added, “I don’t think Zal feels Bremer did a very good job here.”

Ken Adelman excoriated Paul Bremer as “pretty much a disaster, obviously keener on promoting himself than on promoting Iraqis to govern the country.” He and others told me that Bremer rarely talked with Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, his military counterpart, which had negative consequences. By comparison, Khalilzad had a close working relationship with General George Casey, Sanchez’s successor as the U.S. commander in Iraq. Casey is an easygoing, bookish man who has presided over most of the major battles in Iraq since the insurgency began in earnest, including the assault on Falluja. He and Khalilzad have adjacent offices in the Embassy, and meet and talk frequently.

I n what is left of President Bush’s “coalition of the willing,” Poland, with fifteen hundred troops, has the fifthlargest contingent in Iraq, after the U.S., Great Britain, South Korea, and Italy. On November 12th, Khalilzad met with Radoslaw Sikorski, Poland’s defense minister. Sikorski, who is forty-two, is an Oxford-educated former war correspondent; he took office on October 31st, along with Poland’s new conservative Prime Minister, Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz. Sikorski was accompanied by three senior Polish military officers, and by Poland’s Ambassador to Iraq, Ryszard Krystosik. General Casey sat in on the meeting as well.

Khalilzad began talking about his plan to establish civilian-military provincial reconstruction teams in Iraq. Such teams had had some success in Afghanistan. He wanted Poland’s help, and added, “We hope you’ll stay with the coalition. George Casey here is leading our efforts to transfer authority to the Iraqis, but we have no time line. We appreciate the help Poland has given us.”

Sikorski informed Khalilzad that Poland’s coalition presence in Iraq might not be extended. Ambassador Krystosik lived in Baghdad at considerable risk, and the danger had increased because of a report in the Washington Post, a few days earlier, that certain Eastern European countries were hosting secret C.I.A. prisons for terror suspects. Human Rights Watch had named Poland as one of the countries, although Poland had publicly denied it. (I noticed, however, that Sikorski did not dispute the report in his meeting with Khalilzad.) Sikorski believed that Poland’s position on Al Qaeda’s hit list would now be moved up. His government was angry about the report. Khalilzad responded sympathetically to Poland’s concerns.

Keeping the fifteen-hundred-man detachment in Iraq was expensive. Poland’s defense budget was six billion dollars; Iraq had already cost two hundred and fifty million.

Khalilzad asked what help the U.S. could give.

Sikorski said that an Iraqi minister had told him that Poland would soon be getting an oil contract. If a second oil contract could be arranged, it would help matters even more. Sikorski also brought up rumors that the U.S. was planning to cut its military assistance to Poland. If true, the news would be disastrous for him and for Poland’s Prime Minister. Khalilzad promised to look into that as well.

The discussion turned to what the Polish government was considering in terms of keeping some or all of its troops in Iraq.

Sikorski said that there were two options. The first was a complete withdrawal from Iraq. The second was a scaled-down presence—the option that the Americans preferred.

Before leaving, Sikorski produced the Gold Medal of the Polish Armed Forces, and pinned it on General Casey’s lapel as the Polish officers saluted him. Looking a little embarrassed, Casey thanked them.

Khalilzad and Casey are keenly aware of the diminishing support in the U.S. for the war and for the President. Both referred anxiously to the debate “back home” about keeping troops in Iraq. If the U.S. left now, Khalilzad said, “obviously, we know that there would be a civil war, and a civil war could escalate in several ways. One, in which the Kurds would move to take things into their own hands rather than follow what they have agreed to in the constitution. Out of that, regional conflicts could erupt. There’s also the possibility that the sectarian war would intensify, and you could have the start of a major long-term Sunni-Shia war that could engulf the entire Middle East. You could also get an Al Qaeda rump state emerging in western Iraq, establishing a caliphate of some kind, a little Talibstan, exporting terrorism—and these scenarios are not mutually exclusive.” He added, “But staying the course should not be interpreted to mean that you’re staying the course in terms of everything that you’re doing.”

Later, he said, “We don’t do a good job, sometimes, of describing ourselves. I am a Muslim, representing the United States, so it’s very hard for people to argue with me that America is against Islam. But we’re still at the beginning of developing a relationship of trust, that we will be advocates for reasonable and honorable things.” (In another conversation, he said, “I hope that the Iraqis are going to be convinced that we genuinely want them to succeed. But we have a credibility problem in persuading the people that this is the case.”)

Khalilzad told me that he and General Casey planned to focus on securing Baghdad. “In terms of the war, and also in terms of getting the psychology of the situation changed back home, if we could secure Baghdad in the next year I think it would gain the confidence of the American people that we know what we are doing.” As long as Iraq’s capital city remained insecure, public support for the war would continue to erode.

“This one thing, the war on terror, emerged at the very top and as somehow defining our strategy,” Khalilzad told me. “What the war on terror may have brought about—if it’s done right—is a threat that could keep the superpowers, or the big powers, from going against each other, and get them to coöperate to deal with it. If it’s done correctly.”

I asked if he felt that 2003 had been the right time to launch the war in Iraq.

He paused and then hedged. “Well, I think there was a case that could have been made to do it when it happened, based on the assessment of information about what was happening with the weapons of mass destruction. And a case could also have been made that, you know, we had time to do it later.”

I recalled a conversation in which Khalilzad told me once again that the war in Iraq was “the defining challenge of our time.” He had added, “This is a conflict in which the fate of millions of people is at stake; it’s not some university exercise.” It seemed that he was not so much telling me this as cautioning himself.

In mid-November, Khalilzad flew to Kabul to visit his mother’s grave and attend a mourning ceremony for her. She had died almost two weeks earlier.

The fact that Khalilzad’s mother had been living in Kabul was a well-guarded secret. She had moved to the United States, where all but one of his siblings had also settled, in 1981, but had returned to Afghanistan in 2004. She had lived there in her own home, and he had quietly visited her, through what he described as “complicated arrangements.” When he moved to Baghdad, last summer, his mother, then frail and ailing, had stayed behind. In late October, when he left Baghdad for meetings in Washington, he first made an unannounced stop in Kabul to see her. She died while he was still in the U.S. Khalilzad’s high profile, and the risk of an assassination attempt (three Pakistanis who were part of a plot to kill him were captured in Afghanistan earlier this year), meant that he couldn’t simply fly to Kabul when he heard the news.

Khalilzad acknowledged that his job often involved running from problem to problem, like a fireman. What was missing, for Khalilzad and the Administration, was a focus on long-term, strategic interests. “I shudder to think what we could face if we don’t fix Iraq,” he said. “Whatever brought us here, it’s engaged us in a way that means it’s now about the world. I serve at the pleasure of the President, and if I had to leave Iraq now I would write a memo of the kind that I did in my policy-planning days; I would say, ‘Mr. President, here is what you’ve got. This is going to be your problem. . . .’ I always have my resignation letter and a memo in my head. And I always update it. So I am always with my bags packed.” He added, “Even our policy people don’t really have an adequate appreciation of the consequences and the stakes and the complexities.”

He went on, “When we were dealing with the Soviets, we had a lot of Soviet experts writing policy and making policy, but now we are dealing with a part of the world that is so complicated and with so many factors at play. An incredible amount of resources have been allocated to it and will continue to be for years to come. I think that we need to add people, get the very best available. We do have great people at the top—Secretary Rice and the national-security adviser, Stephen Hadley, who think strategically. You know, the Germans say you have a ‘fingertip feel’—Fingerspitzengefühl—the sense of a place, you know how a place smells, how it feels. A strategist who doesn’t have that innate sense about the area he’s working on is going to get us in trouble. The U.S. government doesn’t have enough people at the top who have that special sense about Iraq and the Middle East on their fingertips. We have the very best people working on it, but, given its importance, we need more.” ♦

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